A new biography of President Barack Obama by New Yorker editor David Remnick has been scheduled for an April 6th release in print, audio and e-book versions. Publisher Knopf Doubleday says the book is based on hundreds of interviews with relatives, friends, mentors, donors, and rivals. Remnick won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for "Lenin's Tomb," about the Soviet Union's collapse, and also wrote "King of the World" about boxer Muhammad Ali.
Obama's name has been magic in publishing -- from books to Spiderman comics -- but some of the luster has worn off since his election. He has been taking his lumps in Congress over health care, and some Democratic candidates are distancing themselves from his policies. It will be interesting to see how this bio fares.
Where did Remnick get the title to his Obama book? Here's how the publisher explains it: In the Prologue to "The Bridge," Obama, who has just announced his candidacy, goes to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, to pay homage to the civil-rights generation, the "Moses generation," and declares himself the leader of the new generation, the "Joshua generation." How a young African-American politician, barely out of the Illinois state legislature, came to such a point is a remarkable American story.
Sonny Mehta, chairman of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, said in a news release about the book: "Obama's election as President was based less on policy prescriptions than on a sense of his character and biography. "The Bridge" reveals not only his character, but also his trials, motivations, and perspectives in a way that a memoir, even a remarkable one, cannot."